Spelmezan, whose work looks at how tactile instructions can be used in physical activity, was particularly interested in snowboarding because the nature of the sport means the instructor must be separated from the student while they are performing the moves and is unable to give any hands-on corrections.

Pressure sensors built into the snowboard detected the rider's weight distribution and worked out the riding edge. When the sensors detected the rider switching from frontside to backside they triggered a set of vibrating actuators positioned against the thigh and shoulders. The vibrations reminded the rider of the correct posture to use when attempting the manoeuvre.

Feedback from snowboarding students suggested that the wearable instructions were useful in learning moves but that correcting too many errors at once creates a sensory overload. With that in mind, Spelmezan concludes that the system would work best if the instructor could program it to focus on correcting the single most important error.

Spelmezan is also hoping to develop the haptic snowboarding setup further to enable it to distinguish between correct moves and mistakes, only providing prompts when the students get their posture wrong.

5 Reader Comments

Very cool! There are a lot of other activities this sort of device could be used for. Golf, judo, archery, physical therapy for arm and leg injuries. Practically anything requiring feedback for body "poses" or alignments. Nice project!

Very cool! There are a lot of other activities this sort of device could be used for. Golf, judo, archery, physical therapy for arm and leg injuries. Practically anything requiring feedback for body "poses" or alignments. Nice project!

Agreed, as a golfer this could really revolutionize golf instruction. Some positions in the golf swing are notoriously difficult for novices to achieve in a static situation let alone in real time with the added pressure of a golf ball to hit squarely.

Heck, I would go further than that. My brother's a very avid golfer, and he had a period where his swing was off for over a year (IIRC he would slice roughly half the time despite tons of effort to fix his swing). If the sensor system could detect the muscles that were causing this problem and vibrate to identify them, it would do more than any golf instructor ever could.

I could go for just publicly available foam box pits to practice tricks before just attempting them on the slopes. I mean terrain parks are already ride at your own risk, so why stop there.

Golf, as mentioned, would be good for this tech assistance as well. They already have video monitoring and correction feedback for your golf swing. The ground work is pretty much already laid then to translate it to physical feedback as well.